The unofficial Bitcoin address shortener

Something has been bugging me for a couple of weeks now about Bitcoin addresses. They are very long, and impossible to remember. As a Bitcoin user and fan, I often found myself going to blockchain.info for information. The rest of the Bitcoin community does as well, since blockchain.info is one of the most trusted and authoritative websites for bitcoins. And with their URL and Bitcoin addresses, it makes for a very long string of information that is not user-friendly at all.

Presented with this problem of a long and impossible set of characters to remember, transcribe, and share, I thought that Bitcoin needs a URL shortener. So I spent the past several days working on a new Bitcoin address shortener, designed specifically for the blockchain. I did a soft-release over the weekend, and now would like to share it with everyone.

If you go to http://btcaddr.es you can enter in your public bitcoin address, and give it a custom and memorable name. Check it out, and give it a like and a share to help get the word out!

For example, if you were to enter in 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa and gave it the name satoshi, you would end up with a shortened URL of btcaddr.es/satoshi. Obviously this example won’t work for you, since it’s already in use. But that is how you use the site.

That address is much easier to use on print for marketing, and on the web, and easy to remember and share. The address will then get sent over to blockchain.info, which has all the info anyone would need to send you money, see transactions, get QR codes, and more.